In a minefield of glitchy AI search and social media, Wikipedia becomes one of the most reliable places on the internet

Over the past two decades, the free-to-use online encyclopedia has carried on with its mission, expanding its global community of volunteer editors, known as Wikipedians, and ultimately resisting the kinds of platform decay that have claimed other 2000s-era internet phenoms.

How old was Marlon Brando in “The Godfather?” That was the fairly straightforward question my husband typed into Google while the movie played in the background over our Thanksgiving break. The answer from Google’s AI overview: “Marlon Brando was not yet old enough to act in The Godfather when he died in 2004 at the age of 80.” It was one of the funnier, somewhat surprising screw-ups we’d seen from Gemini, which like all publicly available artificial intelligence tools is prone to what the tech industry calls “hallucinations.” He screenshot the answer so that we could have a laugh about it, and then scrolled down to find the first non-sponsored, non-AI search result: an entry from one of the most reliable places on the internet, Wikipedia. If I’d written that last sentence at the start of my career, no editor would have allowed it into print. You can’t trust something that anyone can edit, the thinking went, and so it became a bad word in journalism and academia. Don’t cite it; don’t even look at it. Or if you do, for God’s sake, don’t let anyone see you. But over the past two decades, the free-to-use online encyclopedia has carried on with its mission, expanding its global community of volunteer editors, known as Wikipedians, and ultimately resisting the kinds of platform decay that have claimed other 2000s-era internet phenoms like Facebook, Twitter and, to some extent, Google. (In a statement to Nightcap, Google said it maintains a “high quality bar with all Search features” and that its extensive testing found “people find their results more helpful with AI Overviews.” Meta and X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.) What’s emerged is a port in a storm of misinformation, and a potential roadmap for startups as Big Tech continues to abdicate any responsibility for the garbage littering its platforms in the form of AI-generated slop and human-generated propaganda. (By the way, Brando was 47 at the time he filmed “The Godfather” and turned 48 shortly after its release in 1972, according to Wikipedia and multiple obituaries.)